Drohobych fire, 28 January 2025 Дрогобицький район · Drohobych
The fire started on 28 January 2025 in Drohobych, Ukraine, and satellites saw it burning for 3 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 698 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across a single municipality.
It is the 7th largest in Lviv Oblast since 2016 (of 105 with a page). Number 96 in Ukraine in 2025, of 1359.
Compare with…
We have the Copernicus perimeter for this fire, but not yet its hotspots: NASA publishes the yearly hotspot archive only once the year closes. The page picks it up automatically when it is available.
- Burnt area
- 698ha
- Copernicus perimeter
- Duration
- 3days
- 28 Jan 2025 – 30 Jan 2025
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- districts
- Started on
- 28 Jan
- 2025
- Danger at start
- 1
- Very low · FWI index
Where it burned
The weather it burned in
It had gone 3 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.1 mm on 6 Feb.
This area had burned before
21% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 51 ha in 2021, 94 ha in 2022, 2 ha in 2024.
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Kyiv boundary: geoBoundaries · OpenStreetMap, Wambacher · © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL 1.0).
Paris boundary: geoBoundaries · Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière (IGN-F) (Etalab Open License 2.0).
Madrid boundary: geoBoundaries · Open Data ESRI, IGN Central Registry of Cartography Area (CC BY 4.0).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each town
-
700 ha0.4 %
Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the official perimeter with administrative boundaries. The distance runs from the point marking the centre of each area to the nearest fire: staying a kilometre away does not mean it reached the houses.
What burned
- Other natural land81 %
- Mixed forest9.0 %
- Agricultural areas8.5 %
- Broadleaved forest1.9 %
Land cover inside the perimeter as reported by Copernicus EFFIS (outside the Corine Land Cover area).
The weather day by day
ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, the standard reference for past weather, and the Canadian Fire Weather Index (the same system Copernicus uses), computed by WorldFires from that data. Days after the fire run until the first rain.
Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Climate Change Service (ERA5)
| Day | High | Min. humidity | Peak gust | Rain | Danger (FWI) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 28 Jan | 14.7 °C | 51 % | 27 km/h | 0.3 mm | Very low 1 |
| 29 Jan | 13.6 °C | 47 % | 44 km/h | 2.4 mm | Very low 0 |
| 30 Jan | 13.2 °C | 49 % | 20 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very low 0 |
| 31 Jan after | 12.1 °C | 64 % | 40 km/h | 0.9 mm | Very low 1 |
| 1 Feb after | 4.1 °C | 61 % | 41 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very low 1 |
| 2 Feb after | 2.3 °C | 66 % | 20 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very low 0 |
| 3 Feb after | 1.6 °C | 54 % | 37 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very low 1 |
| 4 Feb after | 2.3 °C | 68 % | 29 km/h | 0.8 mm | Very low 0 |
| 5 Feb after | 4.5 °C | 65 % | 18 km/h | 0.2 mm | Very low 0 |
| 6 Feb after | 2.1 °C | 74 % | 25 km/h | 1.1 mm | Very low 0 |
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.
The smoke
CAMS · CopernicusOn 31 January 2025 the air beside the fire reached 26 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).
Particles from the Copernicus CAMS model at the centre of the perimeter; these are not measurements in each town. The pale bar is the worst hour, the solid one the daily average.
Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS)
Other fires nearby
- 1,006 haDrohobych Дрогобицький район28 January 2025 · 6 days · 6 km away
- 394 haDrohobych Дрогобицький районFebruary 2024 · 3 days · 7 km away
- 452 haDrohobych Дрогобицький район20 October 2021 · 6 days · 9 km away
- 530 haDrohobych Дрогобицький район22 February 2025 · 3 days · 11 km away
- 424 haDrohobych Дрогобицький район28 March 2022 · 1 day · 15 km away
- 1,146 haSambir Самбірський районMarch 2020 · 11 days · 16 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Drohobych fire last?
- Copernicus dates it between 28 January 2025 and 30 January 2025: 3 days between the first and last image with fire.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 698 hectares (7.0 km²). Official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Drohobych (700 ha, 0.4 %).
- Did the fire reach a town?
- The fire started in Drohobych and came within 22.6 km of its centre. That is the distance from the perimeter, or the nearest hotspot, to the point marking the centre; it does not mean it entered the houses.
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 14.7 °C, humidity dropped to 47 % and gusts hit 44 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 1, class Very low.
- Where does this data come from?
- From the EFFIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Ukraine (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.
Where to verify it
A satellite detection is not an official report. Final figures and the fire’s status are published by each country’s emergency service.
Emergency number: 101 · 112 · Emergency number and official warnings ›
Satellite cross-check
History of this page Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
No changes since 24 October 2026.
Does something look wrong on this page?
This page is built from satellite data and official records, and it sometimes gets things wrong: the wrong dates, the wrong town, two fires merged into one, or something that was not a wildfire at all. If you know this fire first-hand (you live nearby, saw it, fought it or reported on it), tell us what really happened and we will check it.
Report an error
How we know this
- Perimeter: EFFIS (Copernicus), mapped on satellite imagery.
- Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. No Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
- We have not matched this page with any official record.
- Weather: Copernicus ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, in cells of about 25 km.
Where this data comes from
The perimeter and land cover come from the Copernicus European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), measured on MODIS and Sentinel-2 imagery and published under CC BY 4.0. Heat detections come from the VIIRS sensors aboard Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20, distributed by NASA FIRMS at 375 m resolution. Municipal boundaries come from geoBoundaries ADM2 (Public Domain). The area per municipality is computed by WorldFires by crossing the perimeter with those boundaries, so it may differ slightly from each country’s official figure.